Prime Seats Are Filled For Speech To Nation

By JACKIE CALMES

Published: January 25, 2011

A number of people who assisted or survive the victims of the Arizona shootings will join Michelle Obama in her gallery box in the House chamber on Tuesday night to watch President Obama deliver the annual State of the Union address.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said on Monday that seated near the first lady for the joint session of Congress would be Daniel Hernandez, an intern to Representative Gabrielle Giffords whose immediate attention to her brain wound is credited with helping to save her life; members of the family of the youngest victim who died, 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green; and Dr. Peter Rhee, the director of the trauma center at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson, where the casualties were treated.

According to The Associated Press, Ms. Giffords's office said other attendees would include two other trauma surgeons, Randall S. Friese and G. Michael Lemole Jr., and a nurse, Tracy Culbert. They also cared for the 19 victims -- six of whom died -- after a gunman opened fire at an outdoor event where Ms. Giffords was meeting with constituents on Jan. 8. Jared Loughner, 22, has been charged in the shootings.

White House aides had said that Ms. Giffords's husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly, a NASA astronaut, declined an invitation to attend the speech so that he could remain with his wife, who has been moved to a rehabilitation center in Houston that is nearer where he lives and trains for a coming space shuttle mission.

Mr. Obama is expected to recognize the Arizonans at some point in his address. He recently paid public tribute to them in a speech at a memorial service in Tucson -- for example, insisting that a reluctant Mr. Hernandez accept the widely bestowed designation of hero for his actions after the shooting.

Mr. Gibbs, in his daily White House briefing, declined to say whether Mr. Obama would propose any federal limits on assault weapons or on high-capacity ammunition clips used in the shooting.

The tradition of inviting people to sit with the first lady for the nationally televised speech dates to Ronald Reagan. In January 1982 he introduced a government employee, Lenny Skutnik, who that month had jumped into the icy Potomac River after a plane crash to rescue a drowning woman, as representative of ''the spirit of American heroism at its finest.''

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.